Subject of Syracuse native's book becomes major motion picture

Karen Ballard/AP Photo/Paramount VantageIn this image released by Paramount Vantage, Liev Schreiber, left, and Daniel Craig are shown in a scene from, "Defiance."

On Friday, the movie Defiance opens. Starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber, the film tells the true story of three Jewish brothers who escaped the Nazis and set up a rebel camp in the woods of Belarus.

The story of Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski was mostly lost to history until Syracuse native Peter Duffy stumbled onto an intriguing reference to "forest Jews" on the Internet. He started to dig and eventually wrote a book, The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest (2003).

Peter Duffy grew up in local newsrooms, where the thrill of the hunt often electrified the air - and his imagination.

"I think even more than the act of going out on stories and learning about events and people, more than that was the atmosphere in the newsrooms that I remember (liking) as a kid, " says Duffy, whose mother is veteran Syracuse TV news reporter Nancy Duffy from WIXT-Channel 9. "I remember Rod Wood one time, during the Iranian hostage crisis, trying to get the Ayatollah Khomeini on the phone. That kind of spirit is what I really caught from the newsroom."

Nancy Duffy remembers carrying Peter around as a baby to news assignments all over town.

"He was in the news business when he was born, " Nancy Duffy says. "His baby book doesn't list his first trip to the zoo, but his first murder trial."

Instead, Duffy moved to New York City and took a job writing for the now-defunct Brooklyn Bridge magazine. (Younger brother Matthew, meanwhile, moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to work as a lawyer.)

When the Brooklyn magazine folded, The New York Times invited Duffy to write freelance city features, what he calls "getting-under-the-skin-of-the-city" kind of stories.

"And that's Peter, " his mother says. "That's part of his personality. I remember when he first went to New York, his hobby was to go to ethnic restaurants ... where he couldn't speak the language. But he just liked being with different cultures and getting to know them and getting to like them and getting to be part of their little family."

Duffy kept his ear to the ground and his eye on the Internet, where an aimless search one day turned up something about "forest Jews." Duffy kept digging, and found a World War II story that would eventually become the subject of not only a Times story, but his first book.

HarperPerennial

After the Nazis executed their elderly parents, three Belorussian brothers - Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski - fled into the nearby puscha, or dense forest, where they helped some 1,200 Jews hide from the Nazis for 21/2 years during the war. Many of those hiding in the forest had escaped from the ghettos at Novogrudek and Lida, where the Nazis executed thousands of Jews.

The Bielski brothers shielded the Jews and organized a military force that killed hundreds of enemy soldiers - almost as many as the fighters from the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

The hidden Jewish village - some called it "Jerusalem in the woods" - had a makeshift synagogue, blacksmith, cobblers, tailors, even a bathhouse and theater troupe. The forest dwellers lived in barracks dug into the earth, and pulled up stakes several times when the Nazis drew too close.

Two of the brothers, Tuvia and Zus, eventually settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1950s, raised families, lived quiet lives and died without notice in 1987 and 1995, respectively. (Asael joined the Red Army after leaving the forest, and died seven months later, fighting Nazis in East Prussia.)

"The first image I had when I learned about them was these three men riding on horseback with submachine guns over their shoulders, steaming through the forest, protecting a growing band of people who had escaped the most desperate circumstances a human could ever live under, " Duffy says. "That immediately knocked me over, when I heard that. I didn't know whether I would write a book on it or what I would do with it. I know that I was really captured by the story."

The astonishing story remained mostly hidden from history, until Duffy's fateful Google session. When he realized where Zus and Tuvia had died, Duffy decided to open the Brooklyn phone book and call the Bielskis listed there. He reached a relative on the first call.

"The widows who had lived through the forest years were all living, " Duffy said.

He gained their trust, and soon one interview led to another and then another.

After the Times story ran, publishers got a whiff of the story, and launched a bidding war for a book deal. HarperCollins prevailed and last month published Duffy's book, "The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest" (25.95), to coincide with the 59th anniversary of the day the forest Jews walked out from the trees, July 10, 1944.

As part of his book research, Duffy interviewed more than 50 forest survivors, traveled to Belarus to see the forests firsthand, and pored over Soviet documents and records kept at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, where he stumbled on a book Tuvia Bielski quietly wrote in the early 1950s, told nobody about and gave to the institute. The rough manuscript, written in Yiddish, contained some amazing information about the forest years, Duffy says.

The book has generated considerable buzz. One of the widows appeared on CNN recently and "was over the moon." Duffy himself has appeared on several news shows and been interviewed by newspapers around the country. But he tries to keep all the hubbub in perspective.

"I'm used to asking questions, not answering them, so it's a little weird, " he says.

Reviews have been positive. But the book's biggest fan might just be Nancy Duffy.

"I bring it with me everywhere I go, and say, "Oh, by the way, have you seen this book?' As only a mother can get away with, " she says.

Now Duffy is hunting for another story worthy of a book.

"But I haven't yet found a subject that knocks me over, " Duffy says. "It's kind of like a marriage: You've got to fall in love before you walk down the aisle."